Herod the Procurator - Richard Carrier

The procurator is particularly to be contrasted with the praefectus, or prefect, “one
put in charge of.” This was primarily a military term, though of course in Augustan times
there was little distinction between the government’ s administration and the military (nor
had there ever been—the Roman state was fully militarized from as far back as records
attest). 91 The office of prefect had a definite place in the Roman constitutional tradition,
as an of ficer delegated by a magistrate to be his of ficial deputy, with real military and
police authority, and sometimes even judicial authority . This post was ordinarily only
held by Knights, and always military of ficers of non-Senatorial rank, and certainly never
by freed slaves, who, as only partial citizens, would not have been legally eligible for the
delegation of imperium. Senators who were delegated authority by higher -ranking
magistrates were granted the more prestigious title of legatus (“legate”), a general term
usually entailing a propraetor or proconsul—if they had achieved the relevant rank: i.e.
any senator who had held the supreme post of consul (of the empire) was thereafter
eligible to serve as proconsul, “on behalf of the consul,” whereas any senator who had
only obtained the rank of praetor , or who was acting on behalf of a praetor , would serve
as propraetor, “on behalf of a praetor .” Roman provinces were governed first and
foremost at the end of a spear , for military power was synonymous with keeping order .
Thus, when a province or regional command was too small to be governed by any of
these Senatorial legates or magistrates, it was governed by a prefect, a distinctly lower -
class officer deputized to act in their name.
The lines later blurred between prefects and procurators, hence many prefects in
later sources are referred to, seemingly interchangeably , as procurators, and one possible
reason for this is not hard to guess at. As the empire became more and more like an
undisguised monarchy, and the public and private treasuries more and more blurred, the
power of procurators became more and more real—even when still informal, their
authority could be hard to challenge. Disobeying a procurator surely became in due
course synonymous with disobeying their employer—who happened to be the emperor ,
and (as one might say) you didn’t take the emperor to court. So it would not be surprising
if we found, well after the Julian period, imperial procurators sharing the emperor’s status
in being above the law . That was a view of the emperor ’s legal status that was certainly
post-Augustan. But there is a more demonstrable reason for the lines to be blurred at this
level of the Roman government: it was often practical to simply hire an existing prefect
as a procurator , since his private role as financial agent of the emperor would then be
immediately backed up by his formal constitutional power as a prefect.
We have evidence of this practice already in the Republic. As Jones puts it, “it
was apparently not unusual for proconsuls to grant prefectures (including command of
91 For the thoroughgoing militarization of the Roman Republic from its earliest days, where no real
distinction existed between public administrators and military officers, see William V. Harris, War and
Imperialism in Republican Rome: 327-70 B.C. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
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